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I've been up all night watching the Troughton recons of the first 2 Great Intelligence stories and uh... this doesn't add up. The 2012 Christmas special provided an origin story for the Intelligence but in The Abominable Snowmen it has been around for hundreds of years prior?

What is going on!? A fairly major fuck up there that Moffat could have avoided merely by basic Wikipedia research.

Because it's a huge error? The entirety of The Abominable Snowmen hinges on The Doctor's prior visit to the monastery hundreds of years ago. It's kinda impossible to overlook when watching either story.

We have an origin story for something that 2 appearances earlier is said to have been around for over a hundred years prior to said origin story. It's a really weird error.

If you have a look at the new DWM Moffat explains that the GI can travel through time. So he did think about it but quite rightly felt no need to mention it in the episode for the six people who'd get worked up about it.

As I understand it, the Doctor's old friend Padmasambhava supposedly contacted the Great Intelligence on 'the astral plane'. Perhaps such contact transcends the boundaries of time and space?

We certainly know messages can be sent telepathically through time (The Hand Of Fear, Silence In The Library, The End Of Time Part One). For me, it's not such a leap to accept the Intelligence, banished in 1892, could be contacted by the wandering meditations of a Tibetan Monk in the 17th century.

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If you have a look at the new DWM Moffat explains that the GI can travel through time. So he did think about it but quite rightly felt no need to mention it in the episode for the six people who'd get worked up about it.

Well, my general loathing of Tom Spilsbury has caused a DWM allergy but it's pretty cool he set the record straight after realising the error. I suppose maybe also, the Great Intelligence could view time in a non-linear fashion ala the Prophets in DS9.

The Badger wrote:

As I understand it, the Doctor's old friend Padmasambhava supposedly contacted the Great Intelligence on 'the astral plane'. Perhaps such contact transcends the boundaries of time and space?

This had occurred to me too and is my personal theory to reconcile the contradiction.

I don't follow him on Twitter. I added Andrew Cartmel on Facebook and that's the extent of my online stalking of Doctor Who famous people. I am told Noel Clarke comes across as a completely unhinged thug on his Twitter though, which sounds amusing.

His deluded belief that being Moffat's arse-kisser-in-Chief makes him somehow special always makes me laugh.

Yes, but as the DWM editor, that's part of his job brief and he's paid to be the arse-kisser-in-chief. What I find amusing that while someone like Ben Cook at least acts like he knows he's a propagandist for the Cardiff regime, Spilsbury pretends that he's an independent actor and his editorial decisions are his and his alone, which isn't true at all. It's the nature of the licensing game; there's nothing that DWM prints that Cardiff hasn't signed off on multiple times. Some things Cardiff will care about less than others (so something like the "Here's what the actors are doing" column will merit a "Whatever" at most), but anything they publish about the new series will have vetted to within an inch of its life.

StCoop wrote:

Especially when it leads to things like him confirming the GI's appearance in the Xmas Special in advance during an argument on Twitter. Wonder how that one went down with Cardiff...

That was not his finest moment. That was a Twitter argument with Blogtor Who, wasn't it?

I don't understand the antipathy in some corners of fandom for Blogtor Who. You can't link to Blogtor Who articles on Gallifrey Base, for example; the software will munge up the link and make it unusable. Maybe it's Blogtor Who's unwillingness to toe the party line? That's one of the striking things about fandom in the past few years, the inability in some quarters to tolerate a "loyal opposition" of criticism done out of love rather than hate.

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